Designer

Jerry Kelly

Jerry Kelly is a book designer, calligrapher, type designer, and typographer. Since the late 1970s he has designed hundreds of books for numerous clients, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Pierpont Morgan Library, The American Federation of the Arts, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Grolier Club, and many others.

Before starting his own design business in 1998, Kelly was Vice President of The Stinehour Press, preceded by a decade as designer at A. Colish. Since 1977 he has maintained a small fine-printing operation, The Kelly-Winterton Press. In addition, he has taught at The Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design, the Society of Scribes, and other groups and institutions, and he has lectured widely.

Kelly’s work has been honored with multiple awards, and his book designs have been selected more than thirty times for the “Fifty Books of the Year” awards for excellence in book design by the American Institute of Graphic Arts. In 2015 he was presented with the prestigious Goudy Award from Rochester Institute of Technology.

Kelly is an active member of the American Printing History Association (where he served as Chairman of the Board and Vice President), The Grolier Club (where he has served on several committees including Modern Fine Printing), and The Typophiles (where he served as President, 2014–2015).

He has written many articles and several books on the subjects of calligraphy, typography and printing, including The Fine Art of Letters: The Work of Hermann Zapf, A Century for the Century, The First Flowering: The Work of Bruce Rogers at The Riverside Press, The Noblest Roman: The Centaur Types (co-authored with Misha Beletsky; winner of the 2016 Bibliographical Society of America Prize) and The Art of the Book in the 20th Century, among others.